Alexa Plus Learned to Order Pizza. Travel Booking Is Next
Photo Credit: Amazon envisions Alexa Plus helping travelers find and book trips using a framework shared with shopping. Courtesy of Amazon
Skift Take
Food ordering is Amazon's dress rehearsal for voice-driven travel planning and booking — a move that could put Alexa between travelers and travel suppliers.
Amazon just gave Alexa Plus the ability to order food from Grubhub and Uber Eats. The more interesting development for the travel industry is what comes next: trip planning and, as developer docs indicate, booking.
“As we think about expanding this framework for future experiences, like grocery shopping, travel planning, and countless other possibilities, Alexa Plus will become increasingly intuitive about matching the right interaction model to each task,” Amazon said in the announcement post on Tuesday.
The structure goes beyond typical call-and-response, it said, in which you ask, it answers, and you open an app to act. The new capability tests an architecture that handles the full transaction, from browsing to payment, to make “every experience feel more natural and effortless.”
For travel, that would mean collapsing research with booking and transactions, setting up Amazon as another AI gatekeeper for both discovery and bookings.
